Olaudah Equiano and the Sailor's Telegraph: The Interesting

Narrative and the Source of Black Abolitionism

Matthew D. Brown

Callaloo, Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2013, pp. 191-201 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2013.0059

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/507659

Access provided at 6 Apr 2020 11:33 GMT from Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
 OLAUDAH EQUIANO AND THE SAILOR’S TELEGRAPH
The Interesting Narrative and the Source of Black Abolitionism

by Matthew D. Brown

I.

The strong presence of the sea is grossly under-examined in American literature, dou-
bly so in African American literature.1 As Elizabeth Schultz observes, “Historically and
culturally, the African American experience has been an inland one. Black Americans,” she
continues, “have not generally turned seaward in their literature.” Although she comes
to a “however” that adds the observation “the sea is not absent from African American
literature,” the rhetorical pose imagined in the claim that “the sea is not absent” is that it
will take a good deal of searching to find it (233).2 And yet, as Jeffery Bolster observes in
his ground-breaking 1997 study Black Jacks, “Sailors wrote the first six autobiographies
of blacks published in English before 1800” (37).3 Many of these autobiographies carry
clear abolitionist intent and hint at the type of anti-slavery discussions carried on by sail-
ors around the Atlantic world. When scholars of African American literature turn their
attention to works written by sailors, like Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of
the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789), most
suffer from the misplaced assumption Schultz points to, and thus fail to see the crucial
link between sailors and black abolitionism. Indeed, what Crispus Attucks, Paul Cuffee,
Robert Smalls, Frederick Douglass, and so many other black revolutionaries in America
have in common is that they were all sailors or in some other way directly connected to
the maritime trades.
Chinosole observes, “The temptation is strong in some criticism to tune in to only one
of Equiano’s voices and to silence others,” and goes on to lament that the factionalization
of academic disciplines has dislocated Equiano’s Interesting Narrative from the contexts that
can best support important new readings (10). What Chinosole highlights is a dilemma
every reader of The Interesting Narrative must confront, as Equiano explicitly lists several
“voices”—Olaudah Equiano, Gustavas Vassa, Jacob, Michael, Captain, Freeman—and
The Interesting Narrative itself is largely about the power and possibility of controlling and
shifting identities. Indeed, its very title lists a “himself” who wrote it, but confronts us
with an “or” that questions the identity of “himself:” Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa.
This is, of course, further complicated where “The African” seems to be appended not to
Equiano’s African name but rather to what he calls his “current name,” Gustavus Vassa,
a Swedish name he was given as a slave. Small wonder it is, indeed, that critics will “tune
into only one voice.” We are confronted with multiple dynamic identities and asked to
sort and prioritize them. The question Chinosole seems to suggest has not so much to do

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with which identity is the most “authentic,” but rather which is it that allows Equiano
to develop and, ultimately, control the others? Of The Interesting Narrative’s many voices,
that which is most often and most completely silenced is, indeed, that voice which speaks
the loudest. After Equiano is taken captive, the voice into which every important event
in his narrative is keyed is the voice of the sailor, and it is this center from which all other
voices flow.
The significance of this is that Equiano’s forecastle sailor’s voice speaks from a largely
hidden source of power in anti-slavery efforts that I call the Sailor’s Telegraph—a network
of information that flowed through free black and enslaved sailors throughout the African
Diaspora. Almost a hundred years before the electronic telegraph, the Sailor’s Telegraph
was a conduit of information from the world of slavery to the world of anti-slavery, without
which the world of anti-slavery could not have made any progress against the institution of
slavery. Since the slave trade itself as well as the slave-dependent industries related to the
production and refinement of cotton and sugar were inextricably bound up with Atlantic
sailor culture, the experience of slaves was readily available to sailors and the experience
of sailors was, if to a slightly lesser degree, available to slaves. Equiano’s experience at
sea grants him the ability to proactively resist the identity-killing experience of slavery;
moreover, it allows him to write into African American literature a view of the sea that
balances the lopsided notion that the sea is only that which separates African Americans
from geographical and cultural connections to Africa via the Middle Passage. Reading
The Interesting Narrative as the work of a sailor uncovers the key role sailoring played in
freeing Equiano and making him the important abolitionist he became; it also uncovers
the key role of sailors in linking the otherwise remote outposts of the African Diaspora.
Moreover, it demonstrates that the type of pan-Africanism that recent critics like Paul
Gilroy, Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and many others have begun to celebrate
could only have been sustained and extended through sailors and the Sailor’s Telegraph.4
Atlantic sailor culture had access to the whole African Diaspora. From West African
slave ports, to Southern cotton ports and West Indian sugar plantations, to Boston sugar
refineries and Liverpool cotton mills, black sailors connected black populations throughout
the world. In addition to making black sailors the agents of their own emancipation and
a source of power for other African American people and writers, Equiano’s narrative
points out that the “people,” as common sailors or non-officers aboard ship were called,
can bring about racial reconciliation by standing up against the tyranny of institutions
that try to superimpose a non-egalitarian social order from the top down. Resisting the
tyranny of arbitrary and despotic power is a common motif in the American sea literature
that Equiano’s narrative helps shape; it provides apt and obvious analogies to the rhetoric
of the American Revolution that is still ringing out as Equiano writes his narrative.

II.

Through a reading of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, focusing on his experience as a

common sailor and the way that experience opens doors to him that would remain closed
had he spent his life as a shore-bound slave, this essay hopes to demonstrate the impor-

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tance of Equiano’s narrative in discussions about the key role sailors played in the aboli-
tion of slavery. By establishing that Equiano participated in the network I call the Sailor’s
Telegraph, and teasing out some of the implications of that discovery, I hope to reposition
critics of Equiano’s narrative to his sailoring and the sea. I accomplish this by drawing on
examples from contemporary historical work on diasporic African seamen. I will also draw
on examples from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to show that the relationship to the sea
Equiano writes into African American literature is by no means a peripheral or incidental
feature of his particular narrative. Rather, as Jeffrey Bolster points out, African American
literature in print form begins with the sea, and still registers the sea as a key, if hidden,
element even as Frederick Douglass pens the first edition of his iconic autobiography.5
Indeed, as I discuss later, the connection between sailoring and subversion becomes even
more explicit in subsequent editions of Douglass’s autobiography.
When Equiano is first taken to the seacoast in The Interesting Narrative, he writes: “The
first object which saluted my eyes when I arrive on the coast, was the sea, and the slave
ship” (53). These filled him “with astonishment,” but this astonishment, he writes, “was
soon converted into terror, when I was carried on board” (53). The ship and the sea become
emblematic of all that is foreign, all that is strange, all that works to enslave. The power
they hold over him, though, is somewhat arbitrary and subject to redefinition. It is Equiano
who makes meaning of them, just as it is Equiano who can later change the meaning of
the ship and the sea in terms of the arbitrary and despotic power they hold over him. In
other words, it is through the ship and the sea that Equiano is able to rewrite his structural
relationship to slavery. This requires Equiano to master the other voices that speak in
the narrative and that effort is also directly linked to his attempts to master the ship and
the sea. As these other voices and The Interesting Narrative itself are really about Equiano
demonstrating his ability to define himself on his own terms, the ship and the sea, as the
starting points of his enslavement, have to be the most essential part of Equiano’s self-
fashioning efforts. When he later writes, “my surprise began to diminish as my knowledge
[about the ship and the sea] increased” (65), he has taken his first steps toward freedom,
which is always linked in The Interesting Narrative to his vocation as a seaman.6
As Equiano gains competence as a seaman, he feels freer and he writes, rather than
feeling terrified and confined, he “now began now to pass to an opposite extreme . . . after
I had been some time in this ship” (65). His growing competence as a seaman points to the
growing possibility that he will free himself from his captors. As he later writes, he may
use his sailor-knowledge to “attempt my escape in our sloop” (107). Now that Equiano
has a trade that gives him more mobility than any other during his age, he could simply
run off on another ship; or, more to the point, he is getting closer to the type of knowl-
edge and competence as a seaman that would allow him to steal the sloop or head up a
mutiny. Equiano’s sailor-knowledge fosters a sense of freedom and now that he has it, he
thinks “of nothing but being freed” (83). As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker observe,
“Equiano’s recent promotion to able-bodied seaman would make it harder [for Pascal, his
first captain and “owner”] to maintain him in slavery” (243). That power Equiano gains
by going to sea, however, is not simply limited to his ability to free himself. The freedoms
sailors enjoyed, even in conditions that were almost the equal of literal slavery for all
common sailors—white and black—potentially made them agents of freedom for others.
As Linebaugh and Rediker argue, sailors make up “a vector of revolution that travels” all

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around the Atlantic world (242). This revolutionary intent, which is preserved in Equiano’s
narrative, travels around the Atlantic through the Sailor’s Telegraph, but one must be able
to communicate in order to spread dissent.
In an earlier book on Atlantic sailor culture, Rediker argues, “The isolation of life at
sea produces within the tar (or common sailor) intensified awareness of the actual and
symbolic uses of power and a powerful need for self-defense” (161); he continues, “Lan-
guage, a pivotal part of any culture, held a special significance in the wooden world” (162).7
The reason for this is that “to learn and finally master the peculiar argot of the sea was to
become a seaman” (Rediker 162). An acute awareness of the power structure sailors live
within is built into the “peculiar argot of the sea.” Becoming a seaman is synonymous
with becoming a freeman for Equiano; more provocatively, it is also synonymous with
becoming an abolitionist because the “argot of the sea” provides him with the rhetoric of
self-defense to attack any power structure that would silence or misuse him.
When Equiano is in Savannah, for instance, he is taken into custody by men “who meant
to play their usual tricks with me in the way of kidnapping” (135). Bolster observes that
because they were seen as subversives and because they were a transient population, no
“free blacks were more vulnerable [to re-enslavement] than sailors” (Black Jacks 200). In
this instance, however, these man stealers are thwarted because Equiano shows his hand
and offers them a double threat. He tells them, “be still and keep off, for I had seen those
kind of tricks played upon other free blacks, and they must not think to serve me so”
(Equiano 135). At this, one says to the other, “it will not do; and the other answered that I
talked too good English.” To which Equiano replies, “I believe I did; and I had also with
me a revengeful stick equal to the occasion,” whereupon “the rogues left me” (135). Now
that they have heard him speak, the threat he represents to them is two-fold. Of course
his “vengeful stick” is his declaration to fight back, but the language of his threat implies
power beyond himself. First, he bests them with language, pointing out their clumsy
expression “too good English,” and then he suggests that his superior rhetoric is itself a
threat to them. Not only is Equiano in a position to speak for himself, someone as literate
as Equiano will be missed, even if he is a freeman, and those who miss him will also come
forth to speak on his behalf. Importantly, in this scene Equiano is clearly identifiable as a
sailor, with his queue haircut and sailor’s clothes, thus the men think they can steal him,
yet his threat points out that he will tell and that his telling will count.8
Equiano’s trade provides him with the coded and subversive rhetoric that passes un-
noticed by the power structure but plays pitch-perfect to its intended audience. Learning
“perfect” English, as expressed in The Interesting Narrative, is the way to use language that
passes beneath suspicion; learning the “peculiar argot of the sea” is the way to embed
that language with several layers of abolitionist intent. The slavers’ tactic of disrupting
cultural continuity and forcing communication in English backfires, as it allows slaves to
bridge cultural and linguistic divides that kept them apart in Africa—it also firmly con-
nects them to Atlantic sailor culture, where English is the lingua franca for sailors, just as
it is for American slaves.9 The one thing plantation slaves do not have that would allow
them to spread the new culture they are forging and coordinate resistance to slavery is
precisely what defines sailors: mobility. The mobility free black and enslaved sailors enjoy
sets into motion what Bolster calls “the evolution of diasporic consciousness” (Black Jacks
21). Because they are traveling around and seeing the way other blacks are living, sailors

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are able to see their experience in collective rather than individual terms. In other words,
pan-African seems but another way of saying black sailor.
The command of English Equiano gains aboard ships and the mobility he is afforded
by his trade place him and other sailor/slaves in a unique position among slaves. Not only
do they find “privileges, worldliness, and wealth denied to most slaves” (Bolster, Black
Jacks 36), they also come into direct contact with and forge links among widely dispersed
slave populations. This was inevitable, as none of those in power wanted to join in on any
of the difficult and dangerous work of carrying out a widely dispersed system of trade
that lived on the sweat of an enslaved and potentially volatile work force. Marcus Rediker
writes, “Seamen were in many ways nomads, and their mobility ensured a rapid diffusion
of their culture” (159); sailor/slaves “diffused” Atlantic sailor culture to tidewater slaves
throughout the African Diaspora. Their mobility ensured a “rapid diffusion” of the col-
lective experience of slavery and the mandate to resist it. To point to Frederick Douglass’s
Narrative—a narrative seemingly disconnected from the sea—it is two sailors sent from
the North whom Douglass helped in “unloading a scow of stone” (62), who put it into
his head to “run away north” where he will “find friends there” and be free (62). These
sailors, as members of the Atlantic sailor culture, are a part of the Sailor’s Telegraph and
understood that they could give Douglass access to a hidden world of abolitionism. This
moment in Douglass’s narrative seems almost incidental in terms of “plot,” yet it repre-
sents a watershed shift of consciousness for Douglass who “from that time . . . resolved
to run away” (62).
Even though white sailors certainly had racial prejudices and many participated directly
in the slave trade, as does, incidentally, Equiano, the similarity between their condition as
exploited workers and the condition of “actual” slaves engendered at least the potential
for a type of natural sympathy.10 Rediker argues that the “extraordinary powers” a sea
captain was granted “tended to nullify at the outset many of the social, political, and cul-
tural compromises that had been worked out between working people and the various
authorities [that existed ashore]” (161). There is perhaps no better example of this than
Equiano’s relationship with Richard Baker. Of this “native of America,” Equiano writes,
“although this dear youth had many slaves of his own,” through the trials of “many suf-
ferings together on shipboard . . . a friendship was cemented between us as we cherished
till his death” (61). The similarity of their situations brought black and white seamen
together outside of a power structure that could, when it wished, exert total control over
them, even where one is the “slave” and the other the “slaveholder.” Rediker observes
that even “seamen in the slave trade . . . were at the same time the captives of their own
merchants and captains” (50). All sailors had to stick together in order to survive. This
engendered sympathy for actual slaves, promoted solidarity among seamen of all races
and nationalities, and inextricably bound up the rhetoric of anti-slavery and the rhetoric
of sailor’s rights.
The rhetoric of resisting power structures and rising against them when necessary, and
generally passing on information surreptitiously so that it goes unnoticed by the power
structure it is designed to resist is the sailor’s milieu; it has obvious appeal for slaves and
abolitionists. Bolster argues, “Sailors became for Black people in the Atlantic world what
newspapers and the royal mail service were for white elites” (Black Jacks 39). Because of
this, sailors eventually became a suspect group and efforts were taken to restrict their

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movement. In The Interesting Narrative, we see various ways authority attempts to restrict
Equiano’s movement and, in short, rob him of that most essential sailor liberty, mobility.

III.

The Denmark Vesey case brought the Sailor’s Telegraph out into the open and focused
Southern fears of slave uprisings on sailors, whom they believed both fomented and
facilitated insurrection. When Vesey stages his failed uprising, the town of Charlestown
“passes the 1822 Negro Seaman Act, which permitted the sheriff to board any incom-
ing vessel and to arrest any black sailor for the duration of the ship’s stay in the port of
Charlestown” (Linebaugh and Rediker 299). “The Revolt,” says Linebaugh and Rediker,
“expressed the power of transatlantic pan-Africanism, [which] frightened the slaveo-
wning ruling class” (299). It also “expressed the power” of sailors in maintaining that
“transatlantic pan-Africanism.” Vesey, who was a sailor for many years before settling in
Charlestown and finding work as a carpenter, well knew that the Sailor’s Telegraph was
the way to facilitate a slave rebellion. Bolster argues that “Slaveholders later claimed that
the planned insurrection was advised, set on foot, and arranged by the agency of free
Negro sailors on board Northern vessels” (Black Jacks 194). Bolster clearly knows that these
slaveholders merely observed that this was a strong possibility—indeed, it was inevitable,
whether they were right about Vesey or not.11 The Vesey case merely gives slaveholding
Southerners a legal excuse to mount an open attack on what they knew to constitute a
credible threat to their existence—black sailors’ freedom of mobility and contact with free
and enslaved Southern blacks. The Negro Seamen Act required Northern captains to pay
the cost of jailing their black sailors while they were in port. This act amounted to a tariff
on black sailors designed to raise their cost beyond what Northern ship-owners could
support, thereby driving free black sailors out of the labor force and discouraging greedy
slave owners from sending slaves to sea in order to profit from their wages. Slaveholding
Southerners knew that black sailors constituted a threat to slavery even as early as the
1760s when Equiano was sailing among Southern ports, and the treatment he receives in
the South is a clear indication of this.
Earlier, I discussed an episode in Savannah where Equiano escapes being re-enslaved
by using his “too good English,” but before this, he is brutally beaten and jailed because
“Dr. Perkins” did not like to “see any strange Negroes in his yard” (113). What is remark-
able about the later episode in Savannah is that it is “the law” in the form of “the watch
or patrol” that comes to find him, and when they do, they threaten to “serve me as Doctor
Perkins had done” (135). Equiano slyly makes it clear that they are in fact looking for him.
At first, he implies that the patrol stops by merely because they saw “a light in the house.”
They then tell him and the friends with whom he is staying that “all Negroes who had a
light in their houses after nine o’clock were to be taken into custody, and either pay some
dollars or be flogged.” But then these men “begged some limes” of Equiano that “they
understood [that he] had” (135). They know he was beaten by Doctor Perkins because he
was speaking with his slaves; they know he has limes; they know that he is now meeting
with free blacks in the South and that he is certainly giving them the news from his trav-

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els. Clearly, “the law” sends these men after Equiano because his presence among slaves
and Southern free blacks constitutes a direct threat. As Bolster says of black sailors in the
South fifty years after Equiano, by “claiming freedom and respectability [they] challenged
the underpinnings of southern society” (Black Jacks 190). By carrying information, they
represented the potential for an even more direct assault on those “underpinnings.”
Black sailors were to the dissemination of information that fueled the abolitionist move-
ment what Harriet Tubman was to the Underground Railroad: both symbols and agents
of anti-slavery. Indeed, historians have often observed: “the Underground Railroad was a
ship.”12 If the Vesey case hints at the network of information sailors constitute in the aboli-
tionist movement, Frederick Douglass’s last autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass (1881), seems to confirm it. In the earlier versions of his autobiography, Douglass
tells us that he is a caulker by trade; this puts him into contact with both enslaved and
free black sailors like Equiano whom he meets in the shipyards while he works on their
ships. He also calls ships “freedom’s swift-winged angels” and, in the paragraph before
he makes his own emancipation proclamation—”You have seen how a man was made a
slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man”—he writes, “This very bay shall yet
bear me into freedom” (75). But Douglass withholds the details of his escape (for obvi-
ous reasons) and thus, he only hints at the possibility that a developed sailor’s network
facilitated his escape. In this later autobiography, however, he is free to mention that his
escape was facilitated by a “friend—a sailor” whom he certainly must have met working
in the shipyards. This sailor allowed Douglass to borrow his “sailor’s protection [papers]
certifying to the fact that he was a free American sailor” (198). “’Free trade and sailor’s
rights’ expressed the sentiment of the country just then” writes Douglass, and being
“rigged out in sailor style,” with his protection papers in hand, allows him to pass to the
North unnoticed (198). When he arrives in New York, a “sailor named Stuart” recognizes
him as a runaway and directs him to his Underground Railroad contact, Mr. Ruggles,
who “was the first officer on the underground railroad with whom” Douglass met “after
coming North” (205). Mr. Ruggles directs Douglass to New Bedford, where “many ships
for whaling voyages were fitted out” (205), and Douglass could find work in his trade,
caulking, among those who would shield him from the man stealers who would press
him back into slavery. Start to finish, Douglass is under the protection of sailors and those
involved in the maritime trades during his escape, and here we see yet again the way the
sea provides a strong backdrop even for a seemingly land-based text like Douglass’s.13
Like Douglass in the editions of his autobiography that he wrote before the Civil War,
Equiano only alludes to the Sailor’s Telegraph in his narrative because it is still active
and viable while he is writing; he does not want to interrupt the flow of information or
place in peril those who pass it along. Indeed, Douglass’s description of himself in the
early versions of his autobiography describes Equiano’s actions, where he mentions that
he has “never approved of the very public manner in which some of our western friends
have conducted what they call the underground railroad, but which, I think, by their open
declarations, has been made most emphatically the upper-ground railroad” (95). Equiano
was, however, clearly one of the Sailor’s Telegraph’s key participants; even if he had not
been able to write his narrative he would be credited with having made a significant
contribution to abolition through the Sailor’s Telegraph.

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When Equiano reports what historians call “the Zong Massacre” to the British abolition-
ist Granville Sharp, he hints at the ways he has been proactively working against slavery
through the Sailor’s Telegraph before he carries his story into print culture through The
Interesting Narrative.14 Linebaugh and Rediker summarize the situation: “After Olaudah
Equiano told him in 1783 about the slave ship Zong, whose captain threw 132 slaves over-
board in order to save supplies and then tried to collect insurance money for the dead,
Sharp publicizes the mass murder effectively” (242). Though the captain and officers of
the Zong were never brought to trial—and indeed the ship owners were allowed to col-
lect the insurance—the incident won over many new converts to anti-slavery and greatly
increased Sharp’s fame. His source, however, went unaccredited for some time; Equiano’s
source is still unnamed, but it is certain that some sympathetic sailor among the Zong’s
crew refused to countenance such an egregiously anti-human act and spread word of it
though the Sailor’s Telegraph. This massacre points exactly to the power of the Sailor’s
Telegraph and to its inner workings. The owners, captain, and officers of the Zong were
working diligently at carrying off a conspiracy and they knew that the power structure
ashore would find their version of events credible. They were thwarted, however, at keep-
ing the massacre hidden, even if they “succeeded” in collecting the insurance. The story
circulated among sailors all over the Atlantic until it finally reached Equiano, who had
the connections to pass it on to Sharp, who did something public about it. In some way,
the Zong story is the story of Equiano speaking “too good English.” Writing his narra-
tive extends the Sailor’s Telegraph to the outside world of abolition in the way Equiano
extends it to Sharp. It is carrying to print culture the language and the intent of Atlantic
sailor culture’s methods of establishing solidarity, self-defense, and, ultimately, a direct
attack on slavery.
Like the experience of slavery, the experience of confronting a power structure aboard
ship that exerted a despotic control over the lives of its subjects resulted in what Rediker
calls “a sharply antagonistic tendency, a subculture or ‘oppositional culture’ shared by
common seamen, with a distinctive set of attitudes, values and practices,” including a
mandate to mutiny when necessary (154–55). In short, any unjust treatment by captains
had an effect that was parallel to the effect of slavery in terms of its potential to foster con-
flict. To extend this argument, all people who are pressed into service against their will, or
who are treated unfairly after they have signed on to do a particular job, make up a crew
of potential enemies: exactly like slaves. This brings us to yet another point of argument
in Equiano’s narrative that is difficult to see if we are not reading it as a sea-based text.
By using the ship as a metaphor for slavery, Equiano hints that a man of his standing
in Atlantic sailor culture has the full resources of his fellow sailors at his disposal and, by
extension, that he has the full resources of slaves at his disposal if he needs them to make
a stand against tyranny. In a key scene where Equiano’s inept captain puts their ship upon
the rocks, we see Equiano hinting at the power he could bring to bear against the forces
of slavery. He tells the captain “he deserved drowning for not knowing how to navigate
the vessel” (128). Equiano knows that his captain is incompetent as a seaman because, in
addition to having by this time learned the rudiments of navigation himself, the “captain
boasted strangely of his skill in navigation” and he also “steered a new course, several
points more to the westward than we ever did before” (126). With understatement, he says,
“this appeared to me very extraordinary” (126). Equiano writes, “The people would have

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tossed him overboard if I had given them the least hint” of the captain’s shortcomings
as a navigator (128). This is a rather remarkable expression of the power Equiano com-
mands within his “oppositional culture.” The “least hint” from Equiano that their captain
does not have a legitimate claim to his power and authority, and moreover, that Equiano
could himself navigate the ship, and the sailors would depose the captain by force. The
implication is that slaves, like sailors, need only the go-ahead and the mandate of right
constituted by incompetence or cruelty to kill their despotic captors. The key implication
in the entire narrative is that a man of Equiano’s skill and standing aboard any ship, a slave
ship for instance, could count on the full support of his sea-brothers against the force of
the power structure at any time in any venture, if he only gives “the least hint.” Shortly
after this episode in The Interesting Narrative, Equiano demonstrates that his power of
leadership extends directly from the “wooden world” to the world of plantation slavery.
Here Equiano literalizes his metaphor of the ship-as-slavery.
Equiano goes with a Doctor Irving to start a plantation in Jamaica. He writes that he
picked the slaves to work the plantation from “my own countrymen” (171). While Equiano
oversees his “countrymen,” all is well. They are well fed, housed, and treated, more like
the slaves Equiano describes in Africa than those in “the American quarter of the world”
(136). When Equiano leaves the plantation, though, he writes “a white overseer had sup-
plied my place” (181). This man, “through inhumanity and ill-judged avarice, beat and
cut the slaves unmercifully” (181). Equiano has previously characterized these white
overseers as “of the worst character of any denomination of men”; he also suggests that
their cruelty causes slaves to “retaliate on their tyrants” (94). Here, Equiano is not so subtle
in showing this in action. The overseer’s avarice is “ill-judged” because, while the slaves
were treated well, all prospered. It is also “ill-judged” because the Doctor is found “dead,
owing to his having eaten some poisoned fish” (182). Equiano reminds slaveholders that
the slaves who fix your food can poison you. He also suggests that, as he had the power
to prevent this while he is on Doctor Irving’s plantation, he also would have the power to
incite it. Just as “the least hint” from him would have deposed his captain, so he suggests
that “the least word” from a sailor like him, or, now, a book like his, could lead to exactly
this type of revolutionary action.
Linebaugh and Rediker observe that “Salt was the seasoning of the anti-slavery move-
ment” (229), which means sailors were in a position to know the horrors of slavery first-
hand and to expose them to people who might do something about it. They are mixed
in, unnoticed, until they express themselves, like the poison substituted for seasoning in
Doctor Irving’s fish. Reading Equiano’s narrative as the work of a sailor provides a key
link to this largely hidden source of power and resistance. It demonstrates that, through
the Sailor’s Telegraph, African Americans embraced core American ideals through the
rhetoric of the Revolution and shaped the country to which they are still denied full access.

NOTES

1. In the introduction to this significant effort to place the sea in the center of discussions of American
literature, Springer asserts, “the vanished western frontier has been repeatedly so studied and
invoked as to make it a hoary cliché.” Though Springer is certainly correct in that “the sea hardly
registers today in our cultural consciousness as setting, theme, metaphor, symbol, or powerful shaper

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of literary history,” he is quick to point out that writing about the sea represented one of the most
popular genres of American writing from the Revolution through the middle of the century (ix).
2. Schultz’ short essay represents one of very few attempts to look at African American literature as
sea literature. Although any critic who follows her is necessarily in her debt, her attempts to account
for such a huge body of work in so short an essay somewhat undercut her intentions. Looking at a
literature that runs from Olaudah Equiano to Alex Haley requires her to do little more than glance
at texts, which seems, unwittingly, to suggest that the sea does play only a cursory role in African
American literature.
3. Bolster lists Hammon, Gronnisaw, Equiano, Marrant, Smith, and King.
4. Of course, this is the groundbreaking work this essay is built upon, but Gilroy and Deidrich and
Gates, as I see it, undersell or wholly ignore the significance of free black and enslaved sailors in
the formation of a pan-African identity. Yet, there was no other group of people of African descent
available to forge, develop, and sustain the links that spread pan-Africanism across the African
Diaspora—not even transplanted slaves.
5. See Murphy on the connections between Equiano’s and Douglass’s text. Murphy says, “Equiano’s
Narrative initiates a tradition of African American slave narrative and serves as a palimpsest for
Frederick Douglass’s well-known autobiography” (553).
6. Equiano, for instance, is able to buy his emancipation through trading that is facilitated solely by
his sailoring. After he strikes a trade agreement with his “owner,” Equiano writes, “I was impatient
till we proceeded again to sea, that I may have an opportunity of getting a sum large enough to
purchase [his emancipation]” (115). When he ships on a large vessel, he writes, “from having this
large vessel, I had more room, and could carry a larger quantity of goods with me” (115). Equiano
then quietly earns the “forty-seven pounds” with which he buys his emancipation. On this point,
see Fichtelberg, who discusses Equiano’s relationship to capitalism. His “conversion,” rather than
the conventional religious conversion, Fichtelberg argues, is a conversion to capitalism.
7. The “wooden world” is a common sailor’s expression for the ship and life aboard it. When Equiano
makes it onto his first ship as a sailor, he writes “To me it appeared a little world” (67).
8. Not incidentally, the Interesting Narrative itself is a similar linguistic appeal to an authority beyond
Equiano himself, and its inclusion of his Manumission paper, for instance, is a similar “vengeful
stick” for those who would attempt to re-enslave him.
9. This is largely due to the fact that sailors of all nations were subject to impressments by the English
Navy. The exigency of getting them to understand their orders also gave them the language to share
and express their collective resentment. A classic example of this is where Equiano ships with a
French sailor who was on the other side in a navel engagement in which Equiano participated (75).
10. Equiano’s participation in the slave trade is a topic critics are reluctant to tackle. Indeed, even in the
Interesting Narrative he mentions: “I used frequently to have different cargoes of new Negroes in my
care” (93). In the context of his narrative, he is speaking of shuttling slaves from place-to-place, not
transporting them across the Middle Passage. But, Equiano places himself all over the Atlantic, in
England, in the Mediterranean, and in what he calls “the American quarter of the world” (136); thus,
it is unlikely that he could have forever avoided the third or “Middle” passage in the triangular trade
route he follows. By arguing fairly convincingly that Equiano was born in South Carolina rather than
West Africa, Vincent Carretta has ignited a bit of a firestorm of criticism. Readers are reluctant to let
go of the idea that Equiano offers a first-hand account of the Middle Passage. The obvious answer
to the dilemma is this: Equiano did see the Middle Passage firsthand, as a sailor.
11. Historiographical work on the Vesey court documents suggests that the case against Vesey was
“whipped up” in order to limit the mobility of free black and slave sailors—who certainly did rep-
resent the type of threat Vesey’s rebellion points to, even if his conspiracy did not exist. See Johnson
915–976.
12. See Siebert 81, 144.
13. It is also worth pointing out, here, that Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a text
seemingly even more shore-bound than Douglass’s, also has as its pivotal movement a slave dress-
ing as a sailor and escaping to sea. When Linda (Jacobs’s name in the narrative) dons her “sailors’
clothes,—jacket, trousers, and tarpaulin hat,” and “walk[s] rickety, like ‘de sailors,” she is able to
easily pass un-noticed (857). The reason she is able to pass un-noticed so easily is explained by Jef-
frey Bolster’s explanation of Douglass’s passing to the North as a sailor in September 1833: “free
black seamen were then so common as to cause few second looks,” even when double-passing as
both men and sailors (“To Feel Like a Man” 1173).
14. See Allison 10–12 and Linebaugh and Rediker 242–43. Both sources attribute the information to
Prince, and Linebaugh and Rediker add Lascelles. Additionally, Charles Stuart makes a great deal

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of the Zong Massacre in terms of its importance in solidifying Sharp’s reputation as one of England’s
key figures in the anti-slavery movement (29–32).

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